For the first 18 years of my life, Detroit was most of my world. Oh, my father had taken my sister and I to both Chicago and New York for visits… but… I was formed by what my father described as "the biggest small town in the world, Detroit!"

Lily Tomlin confessed that she had left Detroit when she found out where she was.

The above sign, however… as they say… says it all.

In addition to living in Detroit, my father was a Detroit Police surgeon. The plague of a disease he described as "socialized medicine" was slowly, steadily, unrelentingly creeping into the Moriarty household for my entire childhood and youth.

The "doom" of socialized medicine hung over the Moriarty future like a Second but ultimately homicidal, Economic Depression.

Beyond lowering our income to what?!

Poverty level?!

Well… it seemed that threatening and immanent at times.

There would be Federales hovering all over my father's prescriptions!

As the son of a pro-abortion Republican, what am I to think?!

Yet my father sent me off to a rabidly Democrat environment among Catholics and Jesuits, the University of Detroit High School.

I was raised among my father's political enemies. It was, however, a great education and we both knew it.

My father then, however, served me up to the perfect antidote: four years of undergraduate schooling at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The priests protested but, as a four year glimpse of everything the Jesuits fought to save me from, Dartmouth did the job. I ended up almost as agnostic as my father had been for all of his life. Dartmouth's graduates are famed for keeping the United States of America at its status quo!

One week in Florence, Italy, however, changed all that.

Four years of Jesuit training swept over me in less than seven days. I was drowning in the most divine version of the Stendhal Syndrome.

No. There was no dizziness nor physical disabilities involved.

Mere awe!

As a young but profoundly confused young artist studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, the ruthlessly breathtaking beauty of the Italian Renaissance filled me with dreams and visions that have taken me an additional fifty years to comprehend.

If Detroit had been a combination of Purgatory and Hell, Florence was my heart-stopping Epiphany from Heaven.

Suddenly everything was possible.

Everything.

Despite the downward fall of America into the increasingly Far Left machinations of the duplicitously Marxist Clintons, the treasonous New World Order sellout to the United Nations by the Bush Family and the thinly veiled, Communist incompetence of the Radical Leftist, Barack Hussein Obama, what I was obviously placed on earth to accomplish as a composer is being achieved.

In the relative quiet of Canada, I have, with God's forgiveness and assistance, lifted myself out of the chronic alcoholism within my parents, my sister and myself; and into the most productive years of my entire life.

Productive in the very way I had originally hoped and prayed for: as a composer.

God willing, the 15 additional years to my life that I daily pray for will be granted me.

That accomplished, my main purpose in life, to compose an impressive body of music, will have been accomplished.

I can largely thank the Jesuits of Detroit for the secret to my American Pilgrimage.

Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@MGMoriarty.